Personal Choice and Sustainable Food Practices
Is How We Produce Food More Important Than What We Eat?
Downtown Redlands bustles with energy every Thursday evening. Stalls of produce and drinks line the street and people stroll around, chattering excitedly with their friends. The smell of food frying fills the air. The closer you get to the food trucks, the more intense are the smells. Tacos, hot dogs, Chinese food and barbecue mingle in the air. As you get in line, you can see them, standing right beside the hot dog truck. A large monitor is set up on the corner of the sidewalk, dark images pop up on the screen, with animal faces flashing across.
The group of four stand back to back, all holding small monitors in their hands. Their faces are covered in Guy Fawkes masks — the white face with a black mustache and beard painted over it that the hacktivist group Anonymous made popular with protestors. The cheeks on these masks are painted pink, like distorted china dolls. The monitors all portray the same video: shots of animals locked and barricaded inside a farm. Farmers manhandling chickens, and a cow being milked by machines.
When you make eye contact with one of them, they lift the monitor higher, ensuring that you see what message they are conveying. The leader lifts his monitor so it covers his masked face. A butcher’s knife swings into a pig’s belly, and even though you can’t hear its squeals, you can feel the sensation running through your veins. “TRUTH” flashes across the monitor, and one of the group attempts to hand out fliers denouncing the meat eating industry and highlighting the end of the world.
The parade of people avert their eyes and walk faster.
This scene occurred back in 2020 right before Market Night at Redlands closed for an indefinite amount of time due to COVID-19. The protestors, known as Anonymous for the Voiceless, had a been a constant presence at the Market Night until then, with complaints about their actions reported throughout the city.
An article published by Redlands Daily Facts in 2019 discussed a letter that had been issued to vendors stating that no political endorsements during Market Night. The article ran a photo of The Anonymous for the Voiceless group, shown holding their signs and looking away from the camera. Redlands City Council disavowed the letter, saying it contravened the First Amendment and stated that only individuals who were harassing and following around market-goers could be barred from Market Night.
Anonymous for the Voiceless is hardly the only, or even the loudest, group championing animal rights. Animal Ethic defines veganism as “a moral position that opposes exploiting and otherwise harming nonhuman animals.” Veganism is more than just a diet, according to Anima Ethics, it’s a protest against the meat industry, cruelty against animals, and, of course, climate change.
Indeed, Google “eat sustainably” and most websites will start with eating more plants. Factory farming produces about 18 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN. The manure from animals alone releases ammonia, methane, CO2, and other pollutants into the atmosphere. The pollution produced by creating meat products is twice that of plant-based products. It seems like the simplest, easiest solution to our climate crisis is to uniform rid meat from our diet. Going vegan is the simplest option; at least, that’s what vegans would want you to believe.
However, not all plant-based diet champions are as demonstrative as Anonymous for the Voiceless. Many simply exercise their own opinions through quiet choice. Take Clement Balanoff, for example. Balanoff is what some might call a free spirit. He has spent most of his life traveling around the world and the last decade in Shanghai.
Recently, he has moved back into the United States to be with his family again. He has only been vegan for around a year now, following in the footsteps of his younger sister, who had previously been vegan with her partner. Though she eventually switched back to a diet that included meat, he stayed with it. “I kept seeing documentaries and had many people in my life who were [vegan],” explained Balanoff. “But finally my eyes were opened. One day I realized I had been vegan for breakfast and lunch and decided I’d try it for a week.”
The first week of veganism, he admits, went terribly. “I didn’t know what to eat.” After asking around, though, he began to eat better. “They taught me tips and tricks, and I knew what to look out for and the regular staples in their diet. I gave it another week and I felt amazing.”
When asked what made him decide to stick with his vegan diet, Balanooff said, “Environment, sustainability, the animals, health, spirituality. All of the above are what made me choose to do it.”
Yes, eating more plants is the top search result when you look up how to eat more sustainably, but is eating more plants a viable option for everyone?
Emily Kissinger is a student at UC Santa Barbara, born and raised in San Jose. For her entire life, she has had to carefully monitor her diet. In addition to dairy, her allergies range from gluten to regular oats. She recalls one instance of when she was a child, when a classmate’s mother made vegan muffins and shared it with her class. Despite Kissinger being told that they were safe, eating the muffin resulted in her vomiting it up, and nearly being rushed to the ER.
“Veganism and its culture is incredibly dangerous to people with dietary restrictions because they have this fascination with not telling you what’s in your food as a “gotcha,”’ she says. “So if you enjoy it they can yell from the rooftops it’s vegan!”
With an already restricted diet, Kissinger worries that by trying to eliminate meats and other animal products, she would be unable to get the proper nutrients she needs. Relying on others for food, or their information, is something that she has been taught to be wary of. Though she may not be vegan, Kissinger finds other ways to try and decrease her footprint while as sustaining her own dietary needs. She cultivated her own tomato plant in her small two-bedroom apartment in Isla Vista, picking them when they’re ripe, and plans to start growing green onions as well.
She also frequents the local farmers’ market. It’s a lot easier to eat when you know what you’re looking for.
Veganism is formally against all forms of factory farming, killing of animals, and fishing and hunting. Indigenous people have interacted with the Earth for centuries before colonization. According to Clarisa Diaz in her article for Quartz, the indigenous people are at the center of the sustainable food conversation. “They are living in communion and harmony with the environment, and that’s the only way to protect it in the long run.”
Indigenous communities today are highly likely to be located in food deserts, i.e that there are very few accessible places for them in order to shop. Driving to far-off places is simply not realistic. Clarissa Diaz writes in a December 2021 piece published by the World Economic Forum and Quartz about how traditional indigenous food systems worked with the environment. There are five things that separate indigenous food systems from the industrialized American food industry: an understanding of nature’s cycles, combining food generations with food production, food and territorial management, and — the thing that Balanoff said convinced him to give up meat — spirituality.
According to Diaz, it is possible for this food system to feed the world and it would be better for the environment, too. Not trying to keep up a year-long demand for out-of-season produce — only marketing fruits and vegetables when they are in season — would eliminate much of agriculture’s carbon footprint… and the food will taste better.
“Think about how much one small farmers’ market farm can produce in one summer,” Diaz writes. “We could be growing a ton of food, then it’s about understanding how to preserve it.”
Shopping locally is another common tip, when it comes to eliminating your own carbon footprint. Fruits, vegetables, meats — when you shop local instead of depending on large, factory farms, or industrialized agriculture, benefits the community and the environment. Individuals, especially indigenous communities, attempting to hunt for their own meat does not contribute to the rapidly rising pollution that factory farming produces.
Back in September 2020, Mi’kmaq fishermen from the Sipekne’katik First Nation in Nova Scotia, Canada, began their lobster fishing season. Twenty-one years prior to this, the Mi’kmaq people won a legal battle with the Supreme Court of Canada that asserted their rights to fish in their own lakes, as per the Peace and Friendship treaties that had been signed back before 1779.
“What people forget is that all of the fishery is Mi’kmaq. And that all of these non-native fishers, they don’t have a constitutional right to fish; they only have a privilege.”
The Mi’kmaq people had always made a living off fishing, and after the court case, agreed to issue fishing licenses amongst their people. When the lobster hunting started, non-native fishermen showed up on boats in order to harass, intimidate, and scare off the native fishermen. The Mi’kmaq, who depend on on fishing, need to bring the 15,000 pounds of lobster their fishermen manage to collect when their boats aren’t being set on fire, or they aren’t being intimidated off their own lands. Police and government officials refused to step in.
Pamela Palmater, a Mi’kmaq lawyer, refers to this as systemic racism. “Any time the Mi’kmaq people have tried to peacefully engage in any of their treaty rights, Aboriginal rights, or just protect their territory from things like hydrofracking, hundreds of [Royal Canadian Mounted Police]are brought in and SWAT teams and armed vehicles.” The Mi’kmaq had to fight for the right in order to be able to fish and make a living from their fishing. Palmater goes on to say: “What people forget is that all of the fishery is Mi’kmaq. And that all of these non-native fishers, they don’t have a constitutional right to fish; they only have a privilege.”
Individuals can and should made the personal food choices that are good for them. Ultimately, though, it’s industrial agriculture, with its huge carbon footprint and massive amounts of waste that needs to be changed. In order to be both compassionate and to take care of the Earth, the steps necessary to fix our food systems should come first.
